The Internet brings numerous links to light nowadays between the globalization phenomenon –i.e. harmonic growth at the worldwide level of intercommunications among nations, human activities and political systems – and translations; this is confirmed by conversations without geographical boundaries, either directly or by means of public documents (blogs), made extremely simple by the combination of Internet and multimedia publication software. Moreover, English is no longer the most absolute vehicular or common language in this digital tower of Babel which is the Web: Chinese (Mandarin) already represents more than 18% of intercommunications and publications on he Web, while Spanish almost 5% and Arabic is in rapid growth, to name just those. Due to these irrefutable realities, the automated or machine translation has become, out of necessity, an essential feature of the Web and its growth is quick in the same way that simultaneous translation software is. Are we moving towards a horizon where languages will no longer be on the web of insurmountable obstacles? It truly appears so, and fairly soon a Latin-American will be able to read the daily edition of the newspaper “Le Monde” in Spanish or in Portuguese, even if he might not know the French language; or a German reading the news of the day in his own language reported by the daily “El Clarin” from Buenos Aires, even if he might not know the language of Cervantès.
This near future is no longer a pipe dream but rather a quasi-certain reality for tomorrow thanks to automated translation systems combined with the direct involvement of translators helped by new tools such as speech recognition (automated dictation) or the new very competitive and sophisticated assistance software in translation such as Trados, to name only the latter. These almost instantaneous translation services are already offered on a number of sites on the Web and often free of charge. As far as automatic translation systems are concerned, they are few and far between above all inserted or coupled with the Microsoft, Yahoo and Google (with 51 offered languages) search engines; or these translations are directly provided by the large sites, in which Wikipedia is in first place among the multilingual collective encyclopedia created on the Web and working on the principle of transformable pages (Wiki) by its users, which represents the actual Babel with its more than 200 languages. These automated translation systems have evolved considerably since the mechanical translations based on limiting lexicons and rigid and simplified grammatical rules. The computing power of computers and research in mathematics and statistics have greatly allowed refining translations beyond human involvement, with information systems collecting references and equivalences not only by word pairs but, better still, by expressions, segments and sentence types, according to thematic contexts and identified expression sectors. This is carried out by a self-learning automated process of computers thanks to memorization of millions of previous, parallel human translations attributing the equivalences of meanings and the corresponding probabilities. Translation memories and databases collected independently or those available on the Web thanks to the Universities among others and to large institutions (United Nations, European Union and religious Institutions) are also tools of great usefulness in this effort to render the translation process more effective.
It is necessary however to recognize that human involvement remains essential to overcome inherent difficulties in the most complex texts as well as to render the finer points and nuances of literary and poetic writings. The same is true for texts having legal value and involving the responsibility of their writers. Nevertheless, the contribution of automated translation is not only advantageous to the development of globalization but rather this latter might not even exist without its support.
There was a time in the last century when some people deluded themselves into being able to reduce barriers represented by linguistic differences to nothingness thanks to the use of an artificial common language, Esperanto; then came the dominance phase of the English language in which we are still living, yet that of the multilingual Babel is now being established in which the barriers are partially and sufficiently overcome thanks to the automated translation allowed by computer science development.
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